Volume 6, Issue 1 - Narrative Beginnings

This paper poses the question of how the beginning of a narrative may (or may not) imply a generic frame. More precisely, the objective is to examine the way in which the given narrative mood (perspective, type of discourse) and the initial narrating instance (or narrative situation) relate to generic expectations. Specific attention is given to cues of realism in the openings of nineteenth-century European novels. The discussion critically assesses F. K. Stanzel’s ( A Theory of Narrative ) and Philippe Hamon’s (“Un discours contraint”) assumptions about the way in which initial narrative choices might identify the genre of the text. Both Stanzel and Hamon, in their differing ways, over-emphasise the generic implications of the narrative mode. The crucial point of distinction for Stanzel in this regard is the reflector mode. More specifically, he argues that an initial figural narrative situation could be considered conspicuously fictional . Hamon, in turn, highlights the question of novelistic conventions in realistic discourse, one generic marker of which is what he calls the “narrative concretization (alibi) of the performance of the discourse,” such as the strategy of delegating the narration to a narrator-character at the beginning of the novel. It is maintained in this paper that although novelistic beginnings cannot determine the text’s fictionality or genre by their narrative mode alone, the narrative perspective and situation in the opening can evoke, in connection with other potential markers, such as perspective, personal pronouns, verb tense, peritexts, and their combined rhetorical function, generic expectations that shape the reader’s understanding of the text. Paul Valéry’s famous mock-novelistic beginning “The marquise went out at 5 o’clock” is used as a point of reference in the discussion, and representative examples of “realistic” beginnings are drawn from Charles Dickens, Émile Zola and contemporary literature.

Fin-de-Siècle A Hungarian version of the present paper was published as “Erósz és Agapé: Erotextus Edward Prime-Stevenson Imre: Egy emlékirat című regényének expozíciójában” (2019) in Literatura affiliated with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Supported by the ÚNKP-19-3 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology.” gay literature in English operated with a double narrative: one narrative offers a historical (and “innocent”) reading available to general readership; the other offers a personal (often illicit) reading available to the susceptible and initiated readers only. The double narrative, thus, allowed authors to give subtle visibility to same-sex desire in their works that would evade censorship. This paper argues that there is a similar double narrative in the exposition of Imre: A Memorandum by the American music critic and émigré writer Edward Prime-Stevenson. The double narrative of the novel, however, differs from that of prior gay literature. I argue that Prime-Stevenson thought it was a literary sin that prior gay literature offered a sensual, erotic, or even pornographic, subversive secondary reading to susceptible readers. In my reading, Prime-Stevenson consciously planted cues in the exposition of the novel, thus, created an erotext to trigger a similar subversive and illicit reading of his text. However, Prime-Stevenson used this technique to demonstrate that purely erotic literary representations denigrate same-sex desire; therefore, in what followed, he presented a different, agapeic view on same-sex desire. The paper substantiates that Prime-Stevenson’s intention was to break away from earlier narrative “traditions” of gay literature to offer a naturalised and legitimised representation and “script” of “homosexuality” per se. Prime-Stevenson did so in a crucial period of time, as the term “homosexual” just barely entered the English language and its pejorative connotations may not have been set in stone. The paper, as a result, casts a new complexion on sexuality as a literary phenomenon and the relevance of a complex narrative structure composed of “snares” and “false snares” in the exposition of Imre , which plays a crucial role in Prime-Stevenson authoring one of the very first openly homosexual novels in English, which has a happy ending.

The first paragraph of Greene’s The End of the Affair establishes a clear link between two of the major themes of the novel: storytelling and Catholicism. Maurice Bendrix, the first-person narrator, considers whether it is his craft as a professional writer that leads him to begin telling his story the way he does, or, were he a believer, whether the hand of God played a role in organizing the events that he retells. The order in which a story is told is pitted against the chronological order of the events depicted, this contrast in turn masking the one between human choice and divine intervention. The gist of the story is the affair Bendrix conducted with Sarah Miles, and its unexpected and unexplained end at her behest a year before the opening scene, at the height of the Blitz. That mystery is the crux of the plot, for Bendrix’s obsession with uncovering it leads him to hire a private detective, Parkis, whose exploits allow Greene to appropriate the narrative structure of detective fiction to frame his work, especially in what concerns what Franco Moretti called a “double system of meanings”, following Todorov’s work on detective fiction: the superficial level of investigation hides the deeper level of the crime which is only revealed at the end. My suggestion is that Greene’s novel operates under this system, superimposing it to his concerns with jealousy, religion, and how to tell it. The concern with God, however posits issues of authorship and narrative that go beyond the classical detective story. The interplay between narrative time and experienced time expressed in the novel’s initial paragraph is in this way rendered more complicated by a detective story’s reliance on its conclusion for it to “work”. Although the The End of the Affair opens by emphasizing its own opening, both title and structure point to the source of meaning: the end.

Beginnings of fictional narratives apply various strategies to introduce their readers to the represented world, and even if they select a starting point in the flow of events as definitive, they tend to tell something about how the starting situation has been constituted by earlier events and circumstances. Some literary genres represent fictional worlds so different from the readers’ that a general description of the former is also needed in the beginning. A sequel may seem free of the burden of a descriptive introductory beginning, since readers (if they have read the previous work or works) have sufficient information to be able to cope with in medias res beginning. However, long series of many sequels have to be accessible for new readers as well, therefore they offer introductions for a double audience. The paper analyses several beginnings from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. I show how the early novels use the description of the Discworld as a formal feature to begin the narrative; those descriptions fulfil the double purpose of introducing new readers and entertaining the trained ones by new ways of elaboration and adding some new traits.

In her celebrated study The Limits of Critique (2015), Rita Felski asserts that literary criticism during the past 40 years or more has been beholden to “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” a paranoid approach to interpretation that seeks to uncover concealed or repressed meanings without due appreciation for the texts as it appears. Felski believes that “critique” is necessarily implicated in this suspicious reading, and she argues instead for a postcritical approach to literature that would eschew interpretation in favor of description, affect, and enjoyment. Felski’s argument draws upon related critiques of critique, including calls for “surface reading,” “reparative interpretation,” “thin description,” a “new formalism,” and “ordinary language.” In recent years, the advocacy for a postcritical approach and the critical resistance to that approach, and thus the affirmation of the value of critique itself, have formed one of the more animated debates within literary and cultural studies in the United States and elsewhere. At the same time, perhaps ironically, critique seems more necessary and desirable than ever in confronting contemporary reality in the U. S. In this presentation, Robert T. Tally Jr. will discuss current debates over postcritical approaches to literature, and he will argue for an empowered understanding and employment of critique suited both to literary studies and to the world we live in today.

The classic view of narrative since the time of Aristotle is that plot structure is prioritized over characters in defining the nature of stories. According to this view, plot is an abstract structure external to the protagonist, and the protagonist’s actions are determined by the thematic goals of the plot. The current analysis calls for a reversal in the prioritization of these elements in creating a story. We present an Embodied Plot model in which character not only drives plot, but embodies plot as well. According to this model, the dramatic arc of plots is attributable to psychological processes occurring in the protagonist’s mind. Plot structure is thus isomorphic with the psychological and problem-solving experience of the protagonist inside the storyworld. We apply this model to a number of fairy tales to demonstrate how the dramatic arc of these stories can be explained in each case by the protagonist’s experientiality.

The article, on the “scope of empirical narratology”, offers a survey of the emerging field of empirical narratology, which arguably originates with the publication of Psychonarratology (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003). To situate empirical approaches in narratology, the article first outlines the current discussion in the field, which is divided as to whether empirical methodologies represent a un‑/helpful addition to the discipline. After that, three major methods of conducting empirical research in narratology are introduced: i. e., a qualitative, quantitative / corpus-based, and quantitative / experimental approach. Each method is discussed and illustrated with a model study from current research. Finally, the article suggests topics for further investigation in the empirical paradigm. By presenting tenets and study models for empirical narratology, the article hopes to highlight its attractiveness for narratology at large, and to advance the developing framework.